Former Yale professor goes in on the Ivy League

[BlackAchilles]

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.

There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”

I loved this article and its description of the empty farce that these Universities' ideals have become.

 

[ExodusNirvana]

That's all well and good but it's 2014 and intellectual discovery doesn't really pay the bills. The job market is unforgiving.

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

Im not even gonna @ the boy this is relevant to

U dont need a college degree to embark on intellectual discovery. IMO if you go to an Ivy League school and come out unemployable you wasted your time.

 

[wheywhey]

Many black students at these elite colleges major in African-American studies and Sociology. That should make the author happy.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

I sometimes think these articles are ways of lowering the desires of students who really want to go to these Ivy's and lower applicants

And in many fields, i'd take my chances with the Ivy.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Many black students at these elite colleges major in African-American studies and Sociology. That should make the author happy.

equally tragic

 

[Guess Who]

All y'all nikkas completely missed the point of this article.

 

[Scientific Playa]

These kids (ivy league and others) were going strong with the occupy wall street movement but got crushed by the central banking police state. kind of hard to fight the system with new ideas/ideals if your professors and universities are linked into the monetary scam.

 

[tmonster]

 

[Primetime21]

Interesting read

Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.

Comparing experiences with individuals at my school with those who attended the more prestigious universities, I tend to agree with the above. I've had professors who taught at the Duke's and the like tell me the same

 

[yoyoyo1]

Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.

"and that's why I go to my local CC, fukk the Ivy League!"

 

[EndDomination]

I enjoyed the article, and it does reign true. Unfortunately, most students are not going to school for a well-rounded education, as much as for their futures. Sure, not aiming for an Ivy because I want to discover more about the world around me sounds grand, but being able to have the most lucrative career possible, making up for the poverty I had as a child, eventually being able to support my own child and wife, in their endeavors, and being able to bring a change to my community and the world around me, that only prestige could reach, sounds a hell of a lot better.
This whole article comes from an older, bourgeois, White man, who was able to accomplish great things after his Columbia education, he brings that privileged idea that you have a choice between learning and success. That "instead of jumping into your career, try backpacking around Europe, explore your mind with marijuana, and a have a lot of fun" foolishness that completely ignores the struggles that inner-city and the poor-lower middle class have to go through to flourish in this economy. Great article, weak follow-through. I'm not going to give up immediate success, and blow $100,000, to "learn." I'm going to spend that time succeeding.

 

[AB Ziggy]

The reason kids go to Ivy is for the connections and to bring honor to their families. They don't care about the quality of education.

 

[kevm3]

What does he expect? Universities are pretty much recruitment centers for employers. You don't go to college and come out with 100,000 dollars in debt just to satiate your 'intellectual curiosity'. You can do that with the internet, a kindle and some books. That's the big thing about school. You're not there to really learn. You're there to get the grade so it will look great for an employer. Where he talked about risk aversion, that's absolutely correct. Students aren't really learning as much as they are parroting the required information or fulfilling some task by their instructor. John Taylor Gatto has a great book about schooling and how modern schooling isn't created for the intellectually curious. It's there to create employees and people who know how to follow orders.

 

[kevm3]

He even put his book about the real history of modern schooling online:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm